Throughout the country, phone booths have been abandoned by major telephone companies who can no longer afford to maintain them. Typically the phone is ripped out of the booth, leaving the abandoned structure for local residents to either demolish or transform. We have adopted a defunct phone booth located on the Forest Street side of the Downtown Bellingham Community Co-op as a potential site for renewed communication in the present day. Right now, the booth is being used for an informal conversation of sorts using graffiti and stickers; we envision to expand upon this by transforming it into a site for a curated exchange of poetic language. As community members browse the nearby reader board for community information, they can also peruse the poem booth for a little brightness, beauty, and inspiration.

I am proud to have been apart of this project during its first full year of operation. Thank you, Christen, for inviting me to help launch it.